Baptism cupcakes for a gorgeous boy

It has been almost exactly a year since I last wrote on my blog. Since then I had a baby boy and it has been quite busy (but fun!) with two little trolls at home.

My son was baptised last Sunday and as the Greek tradition is to give a little sweet to the guests after the ceremony I decided I had to make a boy version of the cupcakes I made for my daughter's baptism three years ago.


As spring is finally getting closer I opted for some fresh lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream and coloured the icing blue. For decoration I made the cute little baby booties I made last time from homemade chocolate paste. As I had to make 100 pairs of boots it took some time, but was fun to do. I decorated the boots with tiny hearts made of marzipan. The baby booties are surprisingly easy to make - I used the excellent photos and tutorial from Not Quite Nigella's fab food blog




As my little boy has some food allergies and I am still breast feeding I have had to cut out all diary and egg products in my diet so couldn't try the cupcakes myself, but I was told they were very tasty. No wonder, as you can rarely go wrong with lemon!




Although not cupcakes I also wanted to make sugar cookies for the guests, and this was my very first time in trying to make them. I chose a recipe from Cake Journal and it was probably one of the easiest doughs I have ever worked with. It was so easy to roll out and I hardly needed any flour for it as there is quite a lot of butter in the dough. My daughter had a go in making some cookies too and she loved it, so I will definitely make these cookies again - particularly when I can eat dairy again!

I made over 100 cookies - half of them were heart shaped with my son's initials and half as elephants since we had a cute elephant on the invites. The invites were made by my son's godmother and my good friend at The Wishing Tree Designs .






Come Sunday I was quite exhausted having spent a whole week making the decorations and baking cookies and cupcakes so it was fantastic that the ceremony went so well - my little boy was a real champion and hardly cried at all (which is unexpected when you are undressed in front of lots and people and dipped in the baptismal font three times!) - I was so proud of him!

Now that the baptism is over and I have managed to find time to bake 100 cupcakes and 100 sugar cookies and make 100 pairs of baby booties with a 10-month old and 3.5 year old at home I should be able to find the time to bake and blog a bit more! I have baked since last year, but haven't found the time to blog about it, so expect some posts with the cupcakes I made in the interim in the coming days and weeks.

In the meantime I hope you enjoyed the photos of my son's baptism cupcakes!

Cupcake Galore + Croquembouche cupcakes featured on Cupcakes Take The Cake

My croquembouche cupcakes were featured in a post on THE cupcake blog yesterday - Cupcakes Take The Cake. I am ridiculously proud.


They start the post by writing: "These incredible, amazing, utterly beautiful cupcakes are by Greek blogger Cupcake Galore, where you can find out how to make them, via her Flickr account." How cool is that?

Saffron and cardamom cupcakes

Having been away from the blog for such a long time I felt I had to make up for it with two posts today!

About a month ago I was asked if I could have a cupcake stand at the yearly IWOG (International Women's Organisation of Greece) Christmas Bazaar the 4th of December. I am only too happy to oblige! I get to play around with different tastes for Christmas-themed cupcakes and decorations, which is all good fun!

I have already been thinking of different flavours for a while now, and with my mother-in-law's birthday last week I got the change to bake a batch of saffron and cardamom cupcakes I have been meaning to bake for a while.

For me saffron and cardamom are the two spices used in some traditional Swedish sweet buns they make for St. Lucia day (the 13th of December)called "lussekatter". We also make them in Norway and they taste absolutely heaven when made with real saffron. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, but luckily as they also are produced in Greece they aren't too expensive (well, almost €3 for 1g, all is relative!). They create a lovely yellow colour and they have a lovely, lovely fragance which I cannot even begin to describe!

The recipe I used came extremly close to the taste of "lussekatter", especially since I replaced the vanilla with cardamom. As the taste of the cakes themselves is so fantastic I didn't want a frosting that could potentially overpower the saffron taste, so opted for a lemon cream cheese frosting. The lemon taste was subtle and it really complemented the cake itself.

I was going to make candied lemon peel as decoration for these cupcakes, but I thought it would make the frosting too sweet and destroy the whole balance between the saffron and cardamom cake and the frosting, so decided to use only a little grated lemon peel for a nice, yellow contrasting effect to the white frosting.

Personally I thought these cupcakes tasted heavenly and they do taste of Christmas! I guess saffron is an aquired taste, so still not sure if I'll bake them for the IWOG Christmas bazaar though. Time will show!

Vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream for baptism

Wow, it has been months and months since I last wrote a post for my blog! I am blaming the hot summer, the house moving, the no oven for some weeks, and morning sickness for the absence and neglect! :)


I made these cute vanilla cupcake with vanilla buttercream for a baptism this summer. The gorgeous little girl who was baptised had a pink little bunny as a detail on her white baptism clothes, so her mum wanted the cupcakes to match the clothes. I love how things come together like that.

The frosting were in three different colours, pale pink, pale yellow and white. The little pink bunnies were made of homemade sugarpaste and they had a white sprinkle as an eye. I think the whole look came together pretty well if I may say it so myself ;)

Here are some pictures taken by my Dad (playing around with his new fancy camera!)

Pink chocolate baptism cupcakes

It has been a while since the last post, I have been busy baking cupcakes for baptisms and having my family visiting from Norway.

The daughter of a good friend of mine (from Wishing Tree) was baptised almost three weeks ago and I was asked to bake cupcakes for the party afterwards. I was of course only too happy to obliged! We decided on chocolate banana cupakes to keep them nice and moist as they were to be picked up the day before the baptism and as the summer is pretty hot in Greece I went for poured fondant instead of any other type of icings which might melt and get spoilt by the heat and the sun.

Poured fondant is made of melted sugarpaste. It is really easy to make sugarpaste, but not having a microwave makes it a bit more timeconsuming to melt it, and also to keep it hot enough to be able to dip the cupcakes into the fondant. I dipped them twice to make it a nice, round and tall finish to the cupcake, so it did take quite a few hours to dip 100 cupcakes, but it was all good fun!

I had made homemade flowers for decorations made of homemade chocolate paste and a pink sugarpaste on top of it and then finishing it off with a silverball in the middle.

The invitation for the baptism was made by my friend who designs birthday invitations, baptism invitations etc, so obviously the cupakes had to be pink as well :)

I love the way these cupackes turned out, matching the chocolate base with the chocolate flower and the pink fondant with the pink flower. What do you think?

A view of the cupcakes on my kitchen table:



Cupcake on a princess plate:



A close-up:


And finally a view of the cupcake in the box:

Cupcakes 4 Good

Tomorrow, Sunday 6th June I'll be at the International Food Festival - Food 4 Good - at Plaz Aretsou in Krini, Kalamaria (from 8-8.30pm) in Thessaloniki with my cupcakes. The festival will have lots and lots of delicious food from all over the world and I'll be joining the IWOG (International Women's Organisation of Greece) table with 100 cupcakes. There are four flavours: choco-banana with chocolate frosting, vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing, lavender cupcakes with lime cream cheese frosting and carrot cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. All of them will have my handmade decorations made of homemade sugarpaste in different colours :)

The income from the festival will go to various charities, so here is your chance to eat well for a good cause!

Make sure you drop by to taste some delicious food and scrumptious cupcakes!

Here are some beautiful photos of the cupcakes I made for the event. These photos have been taken by my friend Carolyn Carter who is a photographer (among many other creative things!). You can see more photos of the cupcakes she made on her Facebook fan page called Apali Post or her blog also called Apali Post (blog)

Vanilla cupakes with a vanilla buttercream frosting:


Lavender cupakes:


Chocolate/banana cupcakes with a chocolate buttercream:


Carrot cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting:


It was so great to participate in this event, and despite the sporadic rain 10,000 euros were raised for local charities. Hopefully next year will be an even more successful one!

Chocolate and coconut cupcakes

Last week I found myself in the chocolate section at the supermarket. Nothing unusual for me since I wanted to stock up on dark chocolate with more than 70% cocoa solids, and hoping that by some miracle I would find something higher than 70% this time (85% cocoa solids, anyone?) While studying the chocolates and desparing over the fact that one 72% dark chocolate also contains almonds (obviously no good for me since I'll be melting and using the chocolate in cupcakes and frosting) my eyes caught the summery white and blue cover of a bar of Bounty chocolate. Suddenly I remember that I once had an idea of creating a Bounty-like cupcakes, i.e. combining chocolate and coconut! I love coconut, so when some family members had their name's day I already knew what cupcakes to make - chocolate and coconut cupcakes; sounds yummy, doesn't it?

I made my usual chocolate cupakes replacing the milk/buttermilk with coconut milk, made a chocolate buttercream icing and decorated with desiccated coconut. I originally left it to my husband to judge the successfulness of these and although he claimed that you could taste the coconut milk in the cupcake I wasn't sure if he was being entirely honest with me...

Clearly I had to taste them myself. The cupcake came out a bit darker than usual and although it had a nice taste to them, the cake itself didn't have any coconut flavour at all! Big disappointment. I also found that the cake crumbled a lot quicker than usual, so next time I might try to mix some coconut cream powder with milk to get a stronger coconut flavour or make a simple vanilla-coconut base and pairing it with the chocolate buttercream. I might even add some desiccated coconut in the frosting for more coconut.

So my verdict is that although they were good chocolate cupcakes, they crumbled too quickly and the coconut flavour was hardly there. A lot of room for improvement!

However, luckily enough, they at least looked pretty nice!